The Oak Island Mystery Read online

  The highest points of Oak Island barely rise ten metres above the surface of the Atlantic. These high points are drumlins, miniature hills of very hard clay inherited from the Ice Age. Below them Oak Island stands on limestone. Geologically, there are several significant features which are worth careful consideration: the hard clay, for example, is firm enough to be excavated to a considerable depth without any lateral supports being used; and it is also practically impervious to water seepage. Our friend George Young, a professional surveyor in the district for many years, knew a great deal about the characteristics of the local limestone. In his long and extensive experience he encountered many curious natural holes, caverns, shafts, and connecting passageways in the geological formations surrounding Oak Island. The mysterious Money Pit, with its ancillary system of tunnels and vaults, may actually be an adaptation rather than an entirely artificial structure.

  The island’s longer dimension runs from west to east, the western end having been linked to the mainland by a causeway since 1965. The Money Pit is close to the eastern, or Atlantic, side. That part of the island, on the seaward side of the central swamp, is bleak, scarred by craters and the frequently disturbed earth of many old excavations. The rest of it supports the usual island grass, trees, and shrubs. There are interesting ruins here and there, together with a small museum where core samples from exploratory drillings and unearthed artifacts are on display.

  Halifax, seventy kilometres north of Oak Island, was established as early as 1749. Lunenburg, fifteen kilometres southwest of the island, was settled in 1753.

  In October 1759, Charles Lawrence, who was then the governor general of Nova Scotia, included Oak Island in the Shoreham Grant. This grant established the town of Shoreham (which is now Chester) seven kilometres northeast of Oak Island. There is an interesting possibility that this same Lawrence family may have had connections with Rennes-le-Château via the curious tomb at Arques, which was a facsimile of the one in Poussin’s famous painting “Bergeres d’Arcadie” until it was deliberately demolished by the new owner in the late 1980s. This facsimile tomb was constructed nearly a century ago on the orders of an American emigrant named Lawrence who settled near Rennes-le-Château. Records indicate that his wife and mother were buried in it, and when we ourselves photographed the interior in the 1970s, there were certainly two coffins at the bottom.

  Oak Island then became the possession of four families: the Monros, the Lynches, the Seacombes, and the Youngs (possibly George’s ancestors), although it was not inhabited when Daniel McGinnis landed there thirty-six years later in 1795. It is no longer possible to state with any degree of certainty how those four farming families used the island, but, in all probability, they would have pastured some of their livestock there. (Island pasturage had the advantage of not needing to be fenced, and, in the normal course of events, the small islands in Mahone Bay would have been free of predators.) In the eighteenth century, when the oaks were still plentiful, the island might also have been a useful source of timber.

  The earliest known survey would seem to have been the work of Charles Morris, who was then working as an official surveyor in the area. His charts divided the island into thirty-two parcels of land of about four acres each: the first twenty ranged along the northern edge; the last twelve were along the southern shore.

  Early records show that Timothy Lynch purchased land parcel number nineteen from Edward Smith in 1768. (Smith’s Cove may have got its name from this same Edward Smith.) Lynch’s Plot Nineteen was well towards the eastern tip of Oak Island, adjacent to Plot Eighteen, which held the mysterious “Money Pit.” The John Smith (apparently no relation to Edward) who was one of the three original discoverers of the Money Pit in 1795 paid £7.10 for Plot Eighteen on June 26 of that year.

  Presumably, he did this immediately after the three lads had begun their pioneering dig. The former owner is listed as a Casper Wollenhaupt of Lunenburg. Despite Oak Island’s then-sinister local reputation as a haunt of murderous pirates (and worse), young John Smith took his wife and family to live there and thrived for another sixty years.

  Curious rumours of dark supernatural forces on Oak Island were reinforced by a legend that during the mid-eighteenth century the citizens of Chester had seen strange lights burning persistently on Oak Island by night. It was also darkly hinted that two Chester fishermen who had rowed across to investigate had never been seen again.

  Oak Island does seem to possess an atmosphere of subtle mystery and intrigue. Looking out across Smith’s Cove, where the fan-shaped entrance to one of the sinister flood tunnels still lies somewhere beneath the artificial beach, the researcher ponders over who might have constructed this whole weird system, and why. Driving by moonlight across the 200-metre causeway separating Oak Island from Crandall’s Point on the mainland is also an evocative experience.

  But “atmospheres” are notoriously deceptive and subjective. Whether the feeling of enigmatic mystery in the air of Oak Island has any objective reality, or whether the visitor’s knowledge of the island’s strange history generates the atmosphere is an argument which is not easy to resolve.

  What other background information might contribute usefully and relevantly to an analysis of the mystery of the Oak Island Money Pit? How much attention needs to be paid to the climate, the geography, and geology of Nova Scotia itself to gain a fair background for studying the Money Pit?

  Just as Rome and Constantinople were traditionally built on seven hills, so Nova Scotia is built on five; five upland areas and five lowlands. The raised areas are based on hard, crystalline rocks and consist of: the Southern Upland, which doesn’t rise above 600 feet; the narrow, flat-topped North Mountain, which reaches about the same height and runs alongside the Bay of Fundy; the Cobequid Mountains, which are nearly 300 feet higher and cross Cumberland County; the Pictou and Antigonish Highlands; and, fifth, the Cape Breton Highlands which reach approximately 1,200 feet. The five lowland areas have soft, sedimentary rocks beneath them.

  The mineral wealth of Nova Scotia includes lead, zinc, silver, and copper in the Bathurst area of New Brunswick, and coal in the northern part of Cape Breton Island.

  Nova Scotia must also be considered as a mass of lakes, streams, and unusually short rivers — while the subterranean water courses may be larger and more extensive than is generally realized. The curiously named Lake Bras d’Or (Golden Arm Lake) on Cape Breton Island, for example, is saline.

  The Nova Scotian climate is a strange mixture in that it is both continental and oceanic. The southwest coast in particular trends to be mild and wet, and its average temperature is roughly five degrees warmer than the average interior temperature (approximately 45 degrees Fahrenheit and 40 degrees Fahrenheit respectively). The upland temperatures can range from 95 degrees Fahrenheit in summer down to 35 degrees of frost in winter — a remarkably wide range of 125 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s an annual rainfall of between 40 and 55 inches, and fog can hide the southern coasts for as many as ninety days a year. There are upwards of 50,000 acres of tidal marshland in Nova Scotia, and it’s particularly interesting to note that it was the Acadians who began creating dikes around the turn of the seventeenth century.

  With its fogs and sinister tidal marshes, the Nova Scotian coast was a haven for pirates, and Mahone Bay itself was notorious for its pirates, privateers and buccaneers right up until the early years of the eighteenth century. The scores of scattered islands there provided ideal screening and camouflage from both sea and land. Expert anthropological opinion suggests that the earliest inhabitants were the Amerindian tribes who were contemporaries of the old Chaldean civilizations, and pre-dated Stonehenge, the pyramids and the Sphinx. But these palaeolithic tribes — or even their mesolithic or neolithic descendants — were not characterized by their mining or constructional activities. Radio carbon dating of what are thought to be some of the ‘original’ Money Pit timbers produces a date not earlier than 1500 — although even the best radio carbon techniques can leave a few ye
ars’ margin of doubt. There may very well be much older remains on the site.

  About 700 years after the dawn of the Christian era, the Mi’kmaq Indians seem to have migrated northwards into Nova Scotia from what is now the U.S.A. While William the Conqueror was getting a firm grip on England, several thousand Mi’kmaqs were spreading themselves around the coastal area adjacent to Oak Island and its hinterland.

  But the Mi’kmaqs were a travelling people — like the Bedouins of Arabia and North Africa. They carried their homes and their few goods with them and they tended to travel light. There is no known motive — religious or cultural — which might have induced them to construct the elaborate system below Oak Island.

  Although the theory is still controversial with some of the more cautious and conservative historians, it now seems virtually certain that Vikings — and some formidable wild Welsh sea warriors — reached North America and Canada centuries before Columbus. Was the mysterious “Wineland” or “Vinland” which Lief Eiriksson reputedly reached one thousand years ago really Nova Scotia? Thorfinn Karlsefni took three shiploads of adventurous pioneers to an equally mysterious “Markland” a few years after Lief Eiriksson’s epic voyage. Was “Markland” also Nova Scotia?

  Men who could build ships sturdy enough to be rowed across the Atlantic would have been more than capable of excavating or adapting the subterranean system on Oak Island — but what might their motives have been? Norsemen, of course, were not averse to burying dead kings and chieftains complete with their ships and their treasures. Visigoths diverted rivers to bury their great leaders, then let the waters flood back to protect the tomb and the king’s wealth.

  If the radio carbon dating is five hundred years adrift, there’s a remote possibility that some great Viking warlord, or Celtic sea-rover, lies below Oak Island.

  John Cabot raised the English flag on Cape Breton Island before 1500, thus laying claim to what he fondly believed to be part of Eastern Asia in the name of Henry Tudor! Shortly after the turn of the century, Basques and Bretons came in search of fish.

  The French baron de Lery got to Nova Scotia before 1520, while the Italian explorer Giovanni de Verrazano made an unsuccessful attempt to found a settlement there during the third decade of the sixteenth century. Both of these visits are of very considerable significance: firstly, because any Oak Island activity undertaken by their people would harmonize with the radio carbon dating, and, secondly, because some researchers believe that Verrazano named the area “Arcadia.”

  To justify the importance of the word “Arcadia,” we need to look briefly at another mystery. Central to the riddle of the Priest’s Treasure at Rennes-le-Château in Southwestern France is the curious Latin phrase “Et in Arcadia ego.” It recurs in old paintings and on the Shugborough Hall Shepherds’ Monument, in Staffordshire in England. It also appears in the controversial coded parchments which Bérenger Saunière is said to have found inside an ancient Visigothic altar pillar in his mountain top church of St. Mary Magdalene. The classical interpretation of the cryptic Latin phrase is usually taken to be: “Even in Arcadia (the idyllic, innocent, and joyful land) I, Death, am present.”

  Alternatively, the message, carved on the side of a table tomb in Poussin’s paintings, may be taken to mean that the dead man inside the tomb is saying: “Don’t grieve for me: I too, am in Arcadia.” Nicholas Poussin had a great love of Rome, and worked there for many years. Significantly, his own tomb bears a carved representation of the Shepherds of Arcadia canvas bearing the same puzzling “Arcadia” inscription.

  Art historians trace the theme back from Poussin to the Italian painter Guercino whose work on the same motif depicts a skull beside which the words “Et in Arcadia ego” appear. What if the French adventurer, Baron de Lery, or Verrazano, the Italian colonial pioneer, had a very good reason indeed for naming their respective abortive settlements “Arcadia”?

  One of our Nova Scotian friends, George Young, who was himself an expert on the Oak Island mystery, came up with the brilliantly innovative idea that the characters depicted in the Poussin paintings might actually be signalling letters in the old Ogham script. It was George who drew our attention to the fact that Ogham letters are capable of being denoted by the positions of the hands and fingers — as though Ogham were a very early progenitor of the sign language used to help those with a hearing challenge today.

  What if whatever mysterious, wealth-generating secrets were (and perhaps still are) hidden at Rennes-le-Château and/or Glozel, have some curious duplicate, counterpart, or accessory hidden on the other side of the Atlantic? And what if Guercino, Poussin and the other painters who knew at least part of that secret hid ancient Ogham letters in their compositions?

  What if Verrazano’s apparently failed attempt to establish a colony in Nova Scotia was no failure at all but a deliberate cover, or elaborate camouflage, to enable something of immense value and importance to be concealed in the Money Pit on Oak Island?

  The mind of a brilliant Renaissance Italian would have been the ideal spawning ground for the plans of the Oak Island System. Compare it with the catacombs of ancient Rome. The skill of the craftsmen who built, furnished and decorated Renaissance Italy would have been more than adequate to design and build the Money Pit. The question remains: what could have been so vitally important that they went to such lengths to transport, conceal and protect it?

  During most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British and French forces fought long and hard for possession of Nova Scotia. One civil or military pay chest or another, legitimately or illegitimately, could have found its way to the base of a secret subterranean “safe deposit” on Oak Island — if that’s what the Money Pit actually was!

  The massive fortress of Louisbourg at the eastern end of Cape Breton cost the French millions to build. Were some of those funds misappropriated and secretly hidden on Oak Island?

  The Oak Island story may go back much further into the mists of time than is generally realized: fearless Celts, Coptic Christian refugees, grimly determined Norsemen, the noble and heroic Sinclair branch of the Knights Templar after their betrayal and downfall in 1307, Drake’s Devon lads, Kidd’s bloodthirsty pirates, or a detachment of meticulously disciplined British army engineers … who constructed the Money Pit and why?

  The historical and geological background of Oak Island and its immediate surroundings abound with exciting and intriguing possibilities.

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  Smith, Vaughan, and McGinnis

  in 1795

  To understand Daniel McGinnis and his pioneering companions, it is first necessary to know something of the political and social background of Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century. The Chinese have a proverbial “curse” which runs: “May you live in interesting times.” The eighteenth century was — in that subtle Chinese sense — an interesting time to be in Nova Scotia, and particularly if you lived on, or near, its coast.

  The French and English had long disputed the ownership of what was then termed “Acadie” (or, perhaps, more significantly “Acadia,” “Arcadie,” or “Arcadia”). Champlain had been there in 1603 and De Monts in 1604. The Treaty of Utrecht gave Acadia to the English in 1713, but in 1755 the danger of war with France led the English to deport the Acadians to New Orleans. This caused great hardship, and many personal tragedies of the kind Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described so poignantly in “Evangeline.”

  There is an evocative and mysterious tone to the opening lines of the poem:

  This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

  Bearded with moss, and in garments green indistinct in the twilight,

  Stand Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

  Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

  Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep voiced neighbouring ocean

  Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

  Longfellow was a genius with a great interest in history a
nd romantic legends. There is a strong suspicion that — like the even more brilliant J.R.R. Tolkien of later days — Longfellow knew rather more about the undiscovered byways of ancient history than he was prepared to say explicitly.

  Another fascinating parallel can be found in the works of Victor Hugo, and in particular his “La Legende des Siècles.” In one of these epic poems, which Hugo claims are based on historical fact, he appears to be referring to the mysterious lost treasure of Rennes-le-Château, which is, in turn, connected with Oak Island. Longfellow wrote not only of the Acadians, but of Viking legends. His “Skeleton in Armour” suggests that the ancient remains found in Fall River were those of a Norseman who had built the archaeologically controversial Newport Tower on Rhode Island.

  Halfway through the eighteenth century, the indigenous Mi’kmaq population of Nova Scotia was struggling against the new arrivals, and against tuberculosis. The neighbouring Americans were divided between those who wanted nationhood and independence and those who wanted to remain under the protection of the British Crown.

  The Atlantic Ocean provided hazards ranging from floods and storms to pirates and privateers. Nova Scotian fishermen and farmers in those days had to be tough and resourceful in order to survive: they were — and they did.

  By the second half of the century, about 6,000 of the original French settlers had been deported. They were replaced by settlers from New England, Yorkshire, Scotland, and Ireland. The American element in this migration was the United Empire Loyalists, and among them was Daniel McGinnis’s family. They lived alongside other United Empire Loyalists on the comparatively sheltered shores of Mahone Bay. Although life there was undeniably hard in those days, it was not without its compensations: natural resources and worthwhile opportunities abounded for those who were prepared to work.